It is quite amazing how journalists think that they’re doing a good job if they report a publicly available piece of information a few minutes sooner than the competition. 100 years ago, when breaking a story meant that you got your story in the morning edition paper and your competitors couldn’t report on it until the afternoon edition or maybe the next day, this was a good skill to have. But now, just because CNN says “biden is the nominee” a few minutes before Fox News, I can hardly care. They’re both going to say the same thing, anyway.

This is a case where a profession has developed a culture and a value system which has a system of rewards and accolades that is far detached from what their actual jobs should be.

as D-Day indicates I just wish they’d jump the gun on torture or privacy one of these days.

To be fair, I’m sure some reporter got a “Scoop of the Month” award for being the first to get a “We do not torture” quote from “a senior administration official” published in his paper.

It’s a hard sell, because most of the desirable audience (by which I mean people who respond to their advertisers) *doesn’t* want to know that we’re torturing people, that the government is lying, that people in other countries are real and shouldn’t be killed and so on.

Right, because if there’s one thing the nation’s journalists have proven, it’s that they’ve got their finger on the pulse of the average American. Must be all those meals at the Applebee’s salad bar, right, JoAnne?

Quite a few of us in your “audience” are about done being condescended to by our “betters” in the media.  But, you know, whatever. You’ve got your audience pegged so well that newspapers are closing up shop all over the country.

First, there really are still newspapers, and the one on the newsstand this morning that says “Obama picks Biden” will get bought in preference to the one that says “School board decision delayed.”

I was just down at my corner bodega about half an hour ago.  None of the 4 or 5 prominent NYC papers went to print with Biden as the nominee.  They all have big silly headlines that say “Obama To Reveal Nominee Sometime Today”. 

This, actually, is part of the benefit of a 2 AM release—it might show up on the web, for the benefit of people who are up at 2am F5-ing Drudge.  Or maybe if you happened to have news radio or CNN on at the moment.  But it sure as hell won’t make the 11 o’ clock news or the papers (well, OK, maybe in Hawaii?), and since most people are either sleeping or have better things to do, they’ll probably hear about it in the morning when they check their messages.  Or via the morning news, if they’re not signed up for the text.

I think that’s what kind of annoys me about this whole Obama Sold Out The Texters!!1!!11!11! thing—seriously, if you were sitting in front of a computer f5-ing Drudge all night, it’s your own damn fault you got the scoop before the campaign could text it to you.  And most people probably found out when they got up this morning, anyway. 

The other thing is that since most people who signed up for the text are already solidly committed to Obama, and probably in the Democratic base, even if there had been a big screwup I doubt it would lose them any voters.  So the MSM is trying to spin it to piss off people who didn’t sign up in the first place, adding more fuel to the “you know that Obama just doesn’t seem trustworthy…” bullshit fire.

Investigative reporting is dead, dead, dead. It’s been dead for years, save for an annual run at the Pulitzer some newspapers would make. Today’s “journalists” merely rewrite whatever they have been told.

Who flourishes in journalism? A Judith Miller who despite being a “prominent New York Times reporter with access to top U.S. government officials” uncritically helped spread the Bushit about Iraq’s alleged Weapons of Mass Destruction (WMD) Program, and helped the administration out Valerie Plame. Judith Miller makes Jayson Blair look like Mr. Integrity.

And what has the journaistic profession done to police themselves? Zip squatto. Miller’s henchman still works for the NYT, sucking up to the generals.

If Obama performs an ostentatious tease-job at America with his VP pick then fucks-up on the delivery, the the media should have every right to jump the gun.
Hell, they have every right to jump the gun even if he didn’t.
Sometimes the quarterback you root for gets sacked.  It happens…and it’s not because the defensive end is not doing his job right.

Sure, the media trumped Obama’s text message execution plan… but is this really a big deal?

Lynn Sweet of the Chicago-Tribune went on a ridiculous rant on MSNBC last night about how the Obama Campaign broke a social contract with his supporters, and she said this as if this was the most grave breach of trust from the Obama Campaign, a “betrayal” rising to the level of Benedict Arnold.

Are you FUCKING KIDDING ME?  The Bush Administration broke a social contract with America by absolutely running our economy into the ground, putting us in a costly and useless war, and alienating us from the free world.

That’s a social contract breach that actually means something.  Failing to get a text message out as originally planned has about 0.0000000000000001% of the consequential significance of the social contract Bush has broken.

Quite a few of us in your “audience” are about done being condescended to by our “betters” in the media.  But, you know, whatever. You’ve got your audience pegged so well that newspapers are closing up shop all over the country.

To be fair, we here in the blogosphere don’t represent an exact cross-section of America.  We are generally highly educated (either through our universities our own intellectual curiosity), extremely wonkish political junkies acutely in tune with the actual positions and perspectives of the politicians we analyze.

Most people aren’t.  Go ask the average guy who the current US Secretary of State is… I betcha at least twice as many don’t know the answer than whose who do.  And it isn’t because the info isn’t easily available - they just don’t care enough to find it out.

The Presidential Debates in September/October - though they will be carried by EVERY broadcast network - will be viewed by a FRACTION of the number of viewers that tune on for the American Idol finale.

The media deserves a shit-ton of criticism for their lazy approach towards those issues that matter, but most of the audience doesn’t seem to be watching when they actually do talk about those things that matter.  And since the mainstream media is an ad-driven business with a fiduciary responsibility to their shareholders - they report the crap that will draw in the most viewers.  Sadly, that is Paris Hilton’s latest DUI, not the atrocities of Walter Reed.

None of the 4 or 5 prominent NYC papers went to print with Biden as the nominee.

That’s not true.

This morning MSNBC showed both the New York Daily News and the New York Post carrying full frontpage pictures of Obama and Biden with the caption “It’s Joe!” underneath in today’s paper.  That’s at least two of the major NY dailies that did get it into print.

I think there are an enormous amounts of valid complaints for those in the blogosphere to levy against traditional print media outlets.  But we do our argument a great disservice when we make factually inaccurate claims.

This morning MSNBC showed both the New York Daily News and the New York Post carrying full frontpage pictures of Obama and Biden with the caption “It’s Joe!” underneath in today’s paper.  That’s at least two of the major NY dailies that did get it into print.

Those must have been special evening editions, because, again, when I was down at the corner shop a few hours ago, I saw the covers of both of those papers, and neither one had those headlines. 

It most certainly did NOT make it into the morning editions, and any paper that put out an extra edition didn’t get it to stands in Brooklyn until just a few hours ago.

You might want to trust someone who, like, actually was there, and actually, like, saw the newspapers in question.  Why would I lie?

JoAnne, at best, one has only made that case that there is added value in getting stories before the 2am printing deadline for newspapers. How much “breaking news” really occurs between the 12am to 2am interval that makes getting the “scoop” that important so that it appears in one newspaper and not another?

Nobody cares whether CNN or Fox or MSNBC got some little piece of trivia or anonymous quote “first.” It doesn’t matter. But reporters think it matters and are told it matters and believe it matters, and that’s what they obsess over. And it’s a screwed up value system.

people enter the profession because of a deep curiosity about the way people and our society work, coupled with a skeptical attitude towards the first answer anyone gives.

That may be how they enter the profession, but the rest of the culture and pressures turn them into different people, clearly.

Those must have been special evening editions, because, again, when I was down at the corner shop a few hours ago, I saw the covers of both of those papers, and neither one had those headlines.

That may be true, I don’t know… but Mike Brzezinski had a literal paper copy of those papers that she was holding up for the camera at 8am Eastern Time this morning.  What time those papers hit the news stands in the NY Metro, I don’t know.  But they wound up on the set at MSNBC in Manhattan at 8AM this morning.

I wasn’t trying to be a complete ass to you Opoponax… sorry if it came across that way.  I agree with you on nearly everything based on your post history.

I don’t live in NYC, so I don’t know what was at the bodegas this morning.  I trust you when you say that those papers weren’t available when you were there.

The bigger point is that even if those dailies didn’t have those headlines in the first editions this morning, they got them into print pretty quickly afterwords, because they were available in print to at least some people in New York at 8AM.

Mike Brzezinski had a literal paper copy of those papers that she was holding up for the camera at 8am Eastern Time this morning.  What time those papers hit the news stands in the NY Metro, I don’t know.  But they wound up on the set at MSNBC in Manhattan at 8AM this morning.

The NY Daily News seems to be the only one that managed to get a headline about Joe Biden in before the deadline. The New York Times, Post, and Newsday didn’t.

See Today’s front pages (valid only for a few more hours).

they were available in print to at least some people in New York at 8AM.

Maybe the Post* rushed advance copies of the afternoon edition out to Mike Brzezinski? Maybe their art department mocked covers with different names and sent them out to the media for morning news show purposes?  How the hell should I know?  All I know is that, late this afternoon, newstands in my neighborhood didn’t have that edition of the Post yet.  And I live in New York City.  A part of NYC that generally gets the same papers as everyone else does, at the same times (they coordinate it that way). 

*OK, I guess I didn’t remember whether the Daily News had it or not—maybe they were sold out of the DN by the time I was at the bodega?  If that’s the case, Joanne might be right!  On the other hand, it was pretty late in the day by then, and for all I know my neighbors are all big Daily News fans.  People pretty much hate the Post around here, and Saturday isn’t a big day to splurge on a copy of the Times, since the Friday and Sunday issues are massive.

Lynn Sweet of the Chicago-Tribune went on a ridiculous rant on MSNBC last night about how the Obama Campaign broke a social contract with his supporters,

Lynn Sweet (of the Sun-Times btw) has a hard-on for Obama. He can do no right in her eyes. Read her blog—it’s a continuous litany. Everything he does is tainted.

JoAnne—people want to read how the emperor has no clothes all the fucking time—unless they’re the emperor or his tailor. Newspapers just aren’t digging up such stories like they used to.  I doubt human nature has radically changed since the 60s. Although papers do cover when a pol puts his peepee where it doesn’t belong.

Sweet is the opposite—the girl who cries wolf. Buying a strip of side yard from a bud who may be crooked is not like letting Halliburton and Blackwater loot the public treasury and gloss over rape.

The danger to the health of newspapers isn’t vapidity or a lack of serious content.

I heard you the first time. It’s abundantly obvious that many journalists are hard at work providing the shallowest, least insightful coverage of the issues that they can; amazingly, despite your certainty that the modern audience craves frivolous journalism, it hasn’t seemed to help.

Could it be that you’ve got no idea what you’re talking about? That your rush to blame readers is just a way of deflecting blame?

I wish I had a video clip from Morning Joe this morning.

Mika Brzezinski was holding up two different newpspapers this morning, the NY Daily News, and the NY Post.

They both had a FULL PAGE cover with a picture - the exact same picture - of Obama and Biden at a debate with Biden pointing to the crowd and both looking forward.

One of the papers had the caption “It’s Joe!”

The other had the caption “It’s Joe” (no exclamation point).

I don’t remember which was which, but the two papers at first glance looked identical until you saw the different mastheads and lack of exclamation point on one.

I checked the Newseum site, and it was only carrying the covers for the early editions of the papers…

I’ll dig around to find either video or a picture of the papers to show that I’m really not a crazy person.

So you learned about Halliburton and Blackwater—where?

Not a single newspaper touched the US Attorneys scandal until after weeks of blog coverage and reporting. Josh Marshall won an award for it, you may recall. The papers sat on the illegal wiretapping story for a year. They’ve never covered the 2000 Florida election fraud, specifically the 20,000 black people who were unlawfully denied the right to vote based on made-up felony records (including some that listed felonies committed in 2010); the only reason we know about it at all has been the reporting of European newspapers.

On the other hand, something on the order of 20,000 stories have been written about John Edward’s haircut. But, you know, keep pretending like that’s all driven by a flagging American interest in real news, as millions of Americans abandon traditional journalism in disgust.

Actually… I’m not gonna dig around for a screen capture of Morning Joe, because I’d rather watch paint dry.

Who cares.  In the grand scheme of life, this is pretty meaningless.

Maybe it was the massive amount of peyote I smoked wearing off and I was just seeing things.

Just kidding…

Or am I?

No, the big serious dailies are running into trouble because, again, the people that the advertisers want to reach don’t seem to *want* big serious content.  They want pretty pixtures and heartwarming stories and examples of how the gummint just wants to grab your guns and steal your money.  And spurts of sports GO TEAM.  So the big dailies are now engaged in chasing the lowest common denominator just to try to pay the bills.

And how do the big serious dailies know this?  Because they hire marketing people to get focus groups to look at mock-ups of the front page and sit around discussing what they “really” want from a newspaper.  Then they redesign the paper and redirect their reporting based on what a small group of people who have a lot of time on their hands say they want from a newspaper.

This is, in fact, the biggest problem with journalism today:  it is now expected to be a profit-making business just like investment banking.  If your newspaper doesn’t increase its profit by 12% each and every year, the stockholders start screaming.

The problem isn’t the readers, JoAnne.  You’ve given up on actually running the paper for the readers to try and make the stockholders happy by increasing profits by any means necessary.  And while you were doing that, readers started drifting away, because they realized the newspaper was no longer written for them.

Don’t blame the readers for leaving once they realized the newspaper was no longer interested in writing for them.

JoAnne, at best, one has only made that case that there is added value in getting stories before the 2am printing deadline for newspapers. How much “breaking news” really occurs between the 12am to 2am interval that makes getting the “scoop” that important so that it appears in one newspaper and not another?

JoAnne, I never said that.  That was somebody else. 

And DTG, again, it’s always possible that he got his hands on The Very First Copy of that edition of the Post, which was rushed out to him as soon as humanly possible, hot off the presses.  Before the complete run of copies had finished printing, gone to the distributors, and trucked out around the city. 

But it wasn’t on stands. 

Which means it doesn’t really count as having got the story “in time”.  Not that this would be a first for newspapers—they generally don’t try that hard to scoop each other on Up To The Minute news like this, especially when it’s just political theater and doesn’t actually matter to people (it’s a little different when the story is 9/11, or the East Coast Blackouts, or something like that).

Though, again, apparently the Daily News really did, which proves me wrong that getting the story before other papers in your market is both possible and worthwhile.

It’s OK to be wrong sometimes.

There won’t be a special evening edition unless war is declared, and probably not even then.  It would play hob with the press schedule as well as staffing.

Is this something that’s changed over the last few years?  Because I know I’ve seen extra editions of papers like the Post and the Daily News.  They might have been pretty old, though; I once did research for this period film that took place in 1977, which required me to read literally every issue of the Post and Daily News for that year.  And I’m almost willing to bet money that at least one of those papers put out a special edition to cover the big blackout that happened that summer.

So you learned about Halliburton and Blackwater—where?  From a friend?

No.  From the media.

Why did the US hire Halliburton and Blackwater? Why are they letting them run open loop? The media hasn’t connected the dots.

If weird stuff is going on in Iraq, what’s going on at home?

I remember when the media brought down a sitting President, for spying on the rival campaign. I don’t see that happening today.